Do not read The New York Times if you want to understand what is going on in Kenya. Here’s Jeffrey Gettleman misleading Americans — and, far worse, slandering Kenyans — when he writes :
“With the president, Mwai Kibaki, a Kikuyu and Mr. Odinga a Luo, the election seems to have tapped into an atavistic vein of tribal tension that always lay beneath the surface in Kenya but until now had not provoked widespread mayhem.” (Jeffrey Gettleman, The New York Times, Dec. 31, 2007).
Instead, you could do worse than starting with my dissertation. I wrote:
“The notion of “tribe,” that is, “social formations held together by primordial ties,” emerged as a “racist concept deployed by colonial anthropology to manage and control dissident populations.” It is not just that the concept of “tribe” was posited as the most primitive form of social organization (ostensibly with “nation” as the highest form). It was also a means of social control. Africans in pre-colonial societies often defined themselves as belonging to a variety of loose associations – subject to chiefs at moments, to cults at others, and at other times to professional guilds – and never simply considered themselves as part of a single “tribal” identity – much less the forms that emerged during colonialism. And whereas various customs had certainly been valued in these communities, colonialism led to the construction and freezing of the ones that proved particularly congenial to the new rulers.”
That does not mean that Kenyans do not perceive themselves as belonging to certain ethnic groups. Indeed, by claiming that they belong to particular “tribes,” Kenyans continue to demonstrate how shackled they are to their British colonizers (and American neocolonizers). But there is nothing “atavistic” about such claims to identity. Indeed, they are modern inventions, as Vijay Prashad (cited in the above excerpt) and Terence Ranger have shown.
